A Pleasure To Burn
by Cruelest Sea
Summary: Maybe just maybe there was still a use for a drug-addicted, "practically human" angel at the end of the world. End!verse AU.


**_A Pleasure To Burn_**

_"That's how you cheat death. Well, maybe you could. If you messed up real bad, maybe death would be confused."-Richard Siken_

It is quiet at the end of the world.

There is a hollow place behind your ribs and you've long forgotten how to fill it. Your tongue is lead in the bottom of your mouth and you have no voice left to speak. You don't move, as still as death, but every nerve is raw and alive, and for only an instant, you long for the drugs you used to depend upon, if only to dull the pain. But your jaw is set, eyes steady, and if anyone was watching they'd see only the resolve of a warrior, the determination of someone with nothing left to lose.

You never thought of the Apocalypse as anything but a distant inevitability, but even then you expected the fever-pitch of armies, the screams of billions, a world set on fire, perhaps, anything but the calm desperation of a ragged bunch of people struggling to survive, a pitiful group of those too stubborn or too unfortunate to already be infected or dead.

From the start, there was never any doubt in your mind that Dean would be among them, their leader. To a man who already survived several lifetimes in Hell, the end of the world was nothing. But then again, he was a different man in Hell, righteous and broken, and nothing like what he became.

You came a long way it seems, both of you. You were unusual from the start, full of questions and doubts and curiosity, nothing like your brothers and sisters. Maybe you were damaged, defective, even then, and you wondered idly if there wasn't a place for angels like you, cast down like Lucifer for your rebellion, or simply tossed to the earth to burn like rubbish.

You were a strange pair, back then, the angel who raised the human from perdition and the human who didn't think he deserved to be saved. He had no faith and you had too much. He was different then, so different you've nearly forgotten. You've seen thousands of men be born and grow old and die, but Dean Winchester had stood out from the moment you set eyes on him, marked and special, the Righteous Man. You'd felt it, in the soul you'd pressed back behind splintered ribs, in every raw nerve and muscle as you'd flown, fingers gripped tightly around his arm.

You understood him in a way he never even understand himself. You reached inside him, wrapped your fingers around and cradled his soul in your hand, healed the burns and cuts that had nearly severed it in half. There were so many scars, so much damage to his soul, even then, and some of the other angels fighting around you, forming a shield, had said Dean Winchester was beyond saving. By then he'd already broken and been broken in every way imaginable, and with him the first seal that led you to this point.

He was righteous and you were an angel then, and what you've become is irony, and for all your struggles to comprehend the nuances of sarcasm and dark humor, teasing, and jokes, you understand that perfectly.

Sam is gone, dead Dean thought of it, and you suppose it is a sort of death because whatever was left of Sam Winchester after Lucifer slithered into his skin was torn into bloody shreds or corrupted long ago. The old Dean would never have believed it, of course, would have insisted on trying to bring him back, pawning his life or soul or whatever it took. You missed that Dean, sometimes, the determination, the fighting spirit when it was still ever so slightly soft and tinged with hope, before life and all it dealt battered him and reshaped him into steel and iron without a hint of kindness.

Sometimes you thought you saw a demon behind the lines of his face, black eyes instead of green when he started torturing, and you wondered how close he was really, how far from human he'd fallen, and whether you, the old you, could still have saved him. You wondered whether there was anything left to save.

Hope is a dangerous thing. Powerful in spoonfuls, careful doses. Too little and you starve for it. Too much and you become reckless, forget to eat anything but. He clung too long to a last hope, gave all he had for it, and you realized, belatedly, that you were the decoy, the distraction. You were useful, one last time, even as human as you are, and you fought, as the cramps from withdrawal started and your body, powerless and so fragile, protested and bled.

You woke up in camp, too weak to lift your head, and the world narrowed to the steady drip of someone else's blood running into your veins, Chuck's ramblings echoing in the room, a single word whispered like breath between your lips _Dean_ and the slightest shake of a head that stabbed you through like the knife you already took to the gut.

No one and no divine sign ever told you that Dean Winchester would die August 2014 with the snap of his neck beneath Lucifer's shoe, and he doesn't come back, not this time, and not ever again. You have a bit of the angel left in you, Chuck said, some frail scrap of grace that meant you lived. You heal and you kick the addiction and the hope becomes yours, the desperation fills you until you choke on it.

It's you, in the end. You who takes the rings, who waits as months bleed into years and the human race endures against all odds and all reason, until the day you open the pit beneath Lucifer's feet and see the look in his eyes, so strange and yet so familiar. You hold him against you with all your strength, the way you held Dean so long ago, and you block out any memory of Sam, any memory of Lucifer, until the creature in your arms is neither friend nor brother, but only the monster at the end of the book.

And you jump, dragging him with you into the pit, and if you had wings they'd be burning, every feather scorched and drop of grace drained, but you have only thin skin and fragile bones and you break apart like stars hurled into a fiery galaxy, mirrored in Lucifer's eyes as he tumbles with you.

There is a strange sort of beauty in the horror as you shatter.


End file.
